Hi everyone,
I have been learning to use the Ogre engine, for a while now, however I was thinking about weather I should just use a full game engine, I don't know which one to use, but the biggest point is I don't want to use one where the whole game is already programmed, all I have to do is set a few variables and say where I want things (darkbasic and Game maker style) I want to write most of it myself and probably just sticking with Ogre and a physics engine will be pretty good for me. I have had a look at some of them and I am not afraid to spend money on them. I don't like the source engine (not sure why there is just something about it that bugs me) and neo axis looks nice but I don't know how well it works. Let me know what you guys think, and what I should do, I'm doing fairly well with Ogre so far and I will probably just end up using it. The way I learn is to read a quick tutorial then start making something and research and learn when I need to know how to do something. It is hard to figure this sort of thing out when there really is no local community and all the game dev classes and courses are 7hours drive away

The best choice for making a pretty standard game are one of the top engines: udk,crytek,unity (most with free license models available). When you want to play around with the sources , irrlicht is an alternative, but ogre nor irrlicht are up to the state of one of the major players.

An alternative is one of the open sources id-tech engines, I'm not up-to-date, but I think that atleast the doom3 engine is available (id tech 3?).

If you have to pick one of the engines comparable to source, I would go for CryEngine as what I have heard about it, a lot of proffesional developers have a dislike of UDK and prefer CryEngine. Same goes if you pick id tech 3, ioQuake3 is probably a better option to start with as those people have been cleaning up the codebase for id tech 3 for a while and might have some improvments added as well.

Other than that a lot of people seem to be using Unity nowadays to do there projects in and supports more languages then just C++ or the language the engine is written in.

And then offcourse there is the last option do everything yourself, while this will take you a lot longer to create a game, it will also teach you a lot of stuff about how to design a game engine and code.